The advantage of the sandwich over set dishes is that it is easier for the cook to prepare and easier for the eater to take — especially if he is in a hurry, or has grown tired of rich foods and wants a change of taste and a bite on the run. So I have not hesitated to squeeze this literary sandwich in among the assorted dishes my dear reader is accustomed to enjoying at the table of "The Woman's Voice"; and if this flavor should trouble my reader, I would remind her that if she returns after it to the other dishes in the magazine, she will "relish" their flavor more than she has been used to relishing it — and I shall thereby have served her, and served my fellow cooks in our great restaurant.

This piece, then, is not a criticism of the books that will appear in it, but a presentation of them and an introduction of the reader to them, built upon what the commentators have said of those books and what the literary circles are saying about them. In my choice of them I have confined myself to some of what has appeared during the month by way of works by women writers, or by personalities who have shone in one facet of life or another.

*

The first book is entitled "Tallulah," in which the actress Tallulah Bankhead has recounted her life. Tallulah is a singular phenomenon in modern American society: a woman whose name has overshadowed the names of many of the country's men and women — not because she is a politician, or a philanthropist, or an inventor, or a woman of letters, or a woman of business, but because she has a most endearing personality. She appears on the stage and captivates all the spectators, even when she acts in failed plays; she stands out in society, and its shining figures hasten to gather round her; she talks in her loud voice, and every sentence is a well-turned joke that the newspaper columns snatch up and that finds its way, after a while, into books. It is not so very hard for a person to attain fame during his lifetime; but it is very hard indeed for anyone to become a legend while still alive. Yet Tallulah Bankhead is today, and has long been, a legend: the people of the country pass her name from mouth to mouth, tell stories about her, true or fabricated, and almost know more about her than she knows about herself. She could drop the last part of her name and roam the Western world wherever she pleased, and no bank would hesitate to cash her drafts! And she herself has helped to create the legend: those

troublesome lion cubs she keeps as other women keep dogs or a cat; that immortal voice in which she whispers so that the neighbors hear; that boldness joined to unconcern which marks her, and which moves her to call the one-eyed man one-eyed and an adversary — let us say "adversary," and not use the word she uses; and those love affairs that rival the loves of history's great lovers — all these have made of Tallulah a legend whose name, if it appears in an article, guarantees its writer readers. What, then, when the legend speaks of herself — and in a large, comprehensive book?

The subject of the book, this being so, is known to a great multitude of readers. Part of it is known to them by hearsay, because no one would ever dare put it in writing for fear of prosecution on a charge of libel and slander. But the important thing is that the heroine herself should recount the events, in her own particular style and with that vitality of hers which none can match — and this is what she has done in the book. Often it seems to the reader that the paragraphs before him, throbbing with life and brimming with warmth, are a seismograph on which great tremors have been registered, set off by this time bomb, or this tremendous hurricane.

The question, then: how much will the author disclose, and how much will she divulge? She recounts her life from her childhood — her mother's early death, and her staying at home with her father, who was Speaker of the American House of Representatives, and with her pious women relations — and she tells of her love, from her earliest years, for mirrors and for every other sort of approbation, which fitted her, while still in first bloom, for the stage. When one of the cinema magazines announced a great contest, Tallulah hastened to send in her photograph and won the prize, and at sixteen she set out for New York — and for the legend that had begun to be woven. Soon she appeared on the stage and began to receive the critics' slaps; she still remembers a comment in one of the papers on the first play she appeared in, which said: "There are three or four girls in the company whom we could wish still under their mothers' care!" In her nineteenth year she went to London to play the heroine of "Rain," but the author of the story, Somerset Maugham, would not accept her, and dismissed her. She lost her head and rushed to her room, put on the clothes of the story's heroine, played the records on which the part had been